HYMN

Hymn is a contemporary adaptation of
Julius Eastman’s The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (1981)

Conceived as a collective call, a ritual of presence and remembrance. Where Eastman summoned ten cellos to embody the spiritual and political force of Joan of Arc, Hymn gathers ten bodies, ten presences, whose voices, breaths, and fluidity become more than a sonic material,  living instruments. These elements accumulate and overlap, creating an organic mass of sound and movement - a field oscillating in errantry. Hymn evokes repetition and shared chant : a hymn as mantra, as a form of unity where words turn into vibration, a space where sound becomes a collective act of resistance, care, and devotion. The title itself opens a dual path: Hymn as an act of remembrance and tenderness, the work becomes an embodied act of speech. Hymn is a performance made of resonance, a prayer without religion, a cry without end, a shared hymn that does not aim to represent but to invoke, to create a temporary space of unity, attention, where embodiment and fervor become gestures of care and transmission.

Julius Eastman’s work has accompanied me for years as a living archive, he has been a living reference and a source of resistance. His compositions, often described as “organic,” move through processes of repetition, accumulation, and transformation, where form emerges through collective motion rather than fixed structure. Eastman’s scores evolve through expansion and friction, shifting from singular to communal, from one voice to the surge of many as a way of composing with rather than for. This principle lies at the heart of my adaptation Hymn, where Eastman worked with ten instrumental voices, I bring together ten bodies, each carrying its own archive and rhythm until they join a common flow. Eastman understood repetition as a political act, as an insistence, a way to speak boldly, to claim space through persistence. By extending his call I wish to let Eastman’s memory resonate as a living presence among us, letting his voice continue through ours. Moving together as a way of remembering him, through the bodies, gestures, and voices of those who, still today, fight to speak themselves into being. The piece becomes a double invocation for Joan and for Julius, these two figures of defiance and transfiguration. Hymn inhabits this lineage: an act of presence and endurance, where memory becomes active and collective rather than commemorative.


Hymn continues my research on the body as an archive from blackness, queerness, and diasporic experience. This performance also extends my ongoing practice of diasporic storytelling, where music and performance are spaces of reunion allowing me to work on listening practices. My work questions how repetition, drift, and accumulation can become strategies of existence and resistance. Each of my performances seeks to create a field of togetherness : a space for gathering, for resonance. I conceive the stage as a place for making the common, where voices hold one another, a “black stage” as a refuge and a force where collective presence can shape new forms of memory.

The spatiality of Hymn continues my research on blackness as a spatial and material condition, darkness as a place of hospitality, echo, and protection. I imagine the stage as an environment that absorbs, shelters, and connects. Here it is a moving scenography, a sound installation that lives continuously through the voices it carries. The performance appears as an activation, a moment that reveals another layer of presence, while the installation remains an autonomous, breathing environment beyond the live act. At Horst, the installation will remain minimalist yet immersive: a few narrow beams of light cutting through the darkness; and a series of microphones appearing only during the performance, like sudden apparitions or summoned voices. This visual work continues my series Black is Everything Beyond the Sun, where blackness functions as an active force, a container for history and imagination.


The sound installation is rooted in sound system culture, sharing both voice and music. In Hymn, the sound system is woven directly into my artistic methodology and my long-term engagement with Black diasporic sonic practices. Sound system culture with its emphasis on presence, repetition, vibration, and DIY spatial politics mirrors the core principles of my work. Like in my performances, the system operates as a body, not simply a tool of amplification but a collective body,  a structure that allows voices to circulate, accumulate, and form a living field of resonance. Using a sound system is not a technical decision but an extension of my practice, where sound becomes architecture, relation, and a way of composing space collectively.

Sound system culture emerges from Black diasporic practices of gathering, self-organization, and creating autonomous spaces. These traditions directly inform the work, which explores endurance, and the shared insistence found both in Eastman’s compositions and in bass-driven sonic environments. The system helps generate a surrounding, a non-frontal space showing sound as care and shelter.

As a live electronic performer, my work is grounded in real-time composition and interaction, creating situations where sound, bodies, and technologies meet. Working with synthesizers, drum machines and unconventional tools such as hydrophones, sound is built through percussion, polyrhythm and texture rather than fixed structures. Echoing theorist Louis Chude-Sokei’s reflections on Blackness and machinic perception, these technologies are reclaimed not as tools of control but as instruments of agency and transformation. Live electronic performance unfold alongside voice and instrumentation acting as a narrative and rhythmic connector.  I also imagine a constellation of intimate voices, a composition that will diffuse recordings of testimonies, whispers, stories, gathered the days before the performance. These voices will exist as dispersed presences throughout the space, sometimes faint, sometimes insistent, like memories vibrating through the architecture. Two central questions will guide the recordings : Black spaces → darkness as care, refuge, and strength & Gestures of care and transmission → how speech circulates within communities. These recordings will become the murmurs of the installation, voices that surround, accompany, and carry the performers during the performance.

The creation process will unfold as a shared experience. I will dedicate the time at Horst to collective work, listening, and construction. During those days, I will collaborate closely with The Constant Now, bringing together performers from the POC community and with Horst’s on-site teams and volunteers. These days will be moments of exchange, where each contribution becomes part of the performance’s living archive. I aim to build a collective process in which each participant brings their own story, their presence, their tone, their way of moving into a larger fabric of gestures and sounds. With these collective gestures, Hymn becomes more than a performance, it becomes a process of making community, of listening together, of composing a temporary home through sound, darkness, and care.

A hymn to presence.